A few weeks ago, we announced a global virtual hackathon to celebrate our growth to over 500,000 developers. The response to our hackathon has been beyond our expectations. Some simple stats:
- More than 4,400 teams and individuals have applied to participate with more joining every day.
- Our amazing teams span the globe! We have participants from every corner of the planet.
- Over 80% of the team members have Github profiles (which is awesome) and an equal number are avid Twitter users.
- Average team size is 3 members.
- We have several teams where team members span 3-4 continents! A truly global hackathon!
In addition, we are even more excited to share that some amazing companies have partnered with to bring you even more prize money! The new prizes now are:
- The top-performing team that has an oDesk.com or Elance.com account will receive an extra $2,500.
- PayPal is sponsoring an additional $2,500 in prize money. Details on how to win this additional amount are coming soon.
- Datadog is adding $2,500 in grand prize money and an additional $1,000 for the team that makes the best use of their service and their API.
- Mashape will reward an additional $1,000 to the one team that best consumes and builds something around one or more APIs available on the Mashape marketplace.
- Sprintly will offer an additional $1,000 to the team that 1) has a Sprintly account, 2) uses their API.
- Digital Ocean will award $5,000 in account credit to the top winning team.
That brings the total prizes to over $25,000! On Nov 21st, along with announcing the hackathon themes, we will email all the applicants how to provide the details required to be in the running for the additional prizes.
We could not be more excited about this. Thank you to all of our partners and to all who have applied. This is gearing up to be an amazing event!
